UTRGV at LASSO 2020 Virtual Conference

During this year's LASSO 2020 Virtual Conference, three different groups of students and researchers from UTRGV connected to the Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) presented.

First, our Engaged Scholar & Artist Award awardees Ms. Madeline Hernández and Mr. José Jiménez did a phenomenal job presenting at their first ever academic conference. Their presentation entitled "Digital Resources for the Public: Virtual Community Engagement and its Impact" highlighted their work on an Adobe Spark page on the CoBiVa (created by Maddie) as well as a video about CoBiVa (created by Freddy). The presentation also described how this fits into the goal of connecting digital and public humanities, their future plans for more resources, and their plans to measure the impact. (We'll be posting the Adobe Spark page and video soon here on the blog.)

Ms. Aubrey Villanueva and Ms. Elsa Magaña presented "The Language of our Community: How the creation of community-based corpora affects students​." This is a project connected to Aubrey's Engaged Scholar Award from Spring 2020 in which she examines the experiences and outcomes of community engaged scholarship with CoBiVa in UTRGV linguistics courses. We hope to submit this manuscript in May 2020. 

Finally, the last UTRGV presentation "Building Sociolinguistic Corpora: CESA & CoBiVa" highlighted work by Dr. Katherine Christoffersen, Dr. Ryan Bessett, and Dr. Ana Carvalho. We presented our preliminary analysis of testing technologically-aided transcription methods, sponsored by the project funded by National Endowment of the Humanities entitled 'Bilingual Voices in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands. Keep checking the blog for more updates on this project.

Great job, team! Also many thanks to the coordinators of the very successful LASSO 2020 Virtual Conference!